Read Online Paper Lantern: Love Stories by Stuart Dybek - Free Book Online

get off welfare by working as a cocktail waitress in a mob bar. Her dream was to go to law school. At the time we met, her daughter, Starla, was in remission from leukemia. When the disease returned, Felice turned to drugs. We’d go together to the children’s wing of County Hospital to read to Starla. She loved stories about cats, especially a series about Jenny Linsky, a black cat who wore a red scarf. I bought Starla a red scarf she took to wearing, which was as close as we could get to bringing her the cat that Felice was determined to sneak into the hospital. Starla’s death after months of wasting away left Felice inconsolable. It wasn’t numbness or escape she was after; she wanted to hurt herself, and I couldn’t find a way to help her. Talking about her like that sounded wrong, though—psychologized, abstracted, factual, but also censored, sanitized, and less than honest. I didn’t know how to tell what had happened, even to myself, and felt too guilty to try. After Felice disappeared, I had lucked into a teaching job in Michigan on the strength of my newly published first book. A few threatening letters from Felice were forwarded to me—letters threatening herself. They arrived with a Chicago postmark but no return address. I never knew where she was living or with whom, and felt braced for worse to come. That night in the pub with Lise, back in the city from which I felt exiled, was the first time in a long while that it seemed natural to share a drink with a woman. When Lise asked me directly, I simply told her I wasn’t seeing anyone.
    Lise said that she was involved, off and on, with an older man who was a collector.
    “A what?” I asked.
    She laughed. “Whenever I say what Rey does, people do a double take.”
    “Tax collector? Butterfly collector? Juice loan collector?”
    “An everything and anything collector. He’s got a great eye! That’s the name of his business: Great Eye Enterprises. He has this talent for stuff. This stein—he could give you a disquisition on beer steins that would make you have to have a set of them. It’s sexy. He’s sexy. It’s partly smell—I don’t think anything indicates sexual attraction more than smell. It’s the sense most directly linked with memory. With Rey it was love at first sniff. The first time I met him, I literally started to tremble and had to hide in the Ladies’. Even when we’re apart I keep one of his undershirts in my closet for a fix.”
    “So, is this an off or an on cycle?”
    “Sort of in between. He’s starting a business in Denver. We talk on the phone at least twice a day. There’s so much history between us, and we deserve to be together, but I don’t know. I need my doctorate, and though he gets me, he doesn’t get that. He’s a salesman, not a scholar. He made a half a million dollars last year and wants to support me, but he’s getting tired of waiting. He says he needs a woman in his bed every night, which sounds hot, but he’s major needy, and in the culture he was raised in I’m not sure ‘in his bed’ doesn’t extend to ‘in the kitchen.’”
    “So, how long have you two been involved?”
    “Seven years.”
    The people we’d come in with were bundling up to head out into a blizzard that had howled in ahead of schedule. We hugged our mutual friend goodbye, and it was only Lise and me left at the table when the waitress announced last call. We moved to the bar, looking for something to cap off the evening and clean away the aftertaste of beer. I suggested grappa. “Perfect,” Lise said. But the bar didn’t stock it.
    “How about a couple shots of Drano instead?” the bartender offered.
    Lise said she had a bottle at her place that she’d brought back from Rome, a trip she’d taken with Buck, a paintings conservator, during an off phase with the collector. She’d bought the grappa because it was flavored with rose petals; it took pounds of petals, thousands of roses, to make a single bottle. In